A punchy hot pink and maroon painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat will be the top lot at Christie’s upcoming 20th/21st century evening sale in Hong Kong on March 28. Titled Sabado por la Noche (Saturday Night), the 6.5 foot by 7.5 foot work was painted in 1984 and comes with an estimate of HK$95 million to HK$125 million (about $13 million to $16 million).
For the first time, Christie’s will hold the auction at the same time as Art Basel Hong Kong.
Sabado comes from a period when Basquiat was working closely with Andy Warhol, which resulted in more than 150 paintings. Basquiat nods to that fruitful collaboration through the silkscreened section of the work, according to Christie’s.
That same year marked Basquiat’s first solo museum show, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Paintings 1981–1984, which was held at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh in 1984, and then traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam through 1985.
The picture is rich with Basquiat’s trademark motifs and images. Two of his “Griot” figures dominate the top of the frame, and scattered throughout the canvas are depictions of animals, simplified female nudes, spirals, doubled gyres, scrawled nods to the solar system, and Fibonacci’s golden ratio.
According to Ada Tsui, Christie’s Asia Pacific’s head of evening sale and 20th/21st century art, the house has been “cultivating the Asian market for Basquiat for years” dating back to 2021, when Christie’s Hong Kong set a record for a Western art sale in Asia with Basquiat’s Warrior (1982), which sold for HK$323.6 million ($41.8 million).
Basquiat’s “powerful work transcends borders and speaks to collectors all over the world, and this sale in Hong Kong is a testament to the demand we see in the region for Western masterpieces of this caliber,” ” Tsui said in a statement.
In fact, Asian collector and billionaire Yusaku Maezawa still holds the record for the most expensive Basquiat canvas sold at auction. He purchased the 1982 piece Untitled at Sotheby’s contemporary art evening auction in New York on May 2017 for $110.5 million.
Additional highlights at March’s sale include Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s 1892 picture La Promenade au bord de la mer (Le Bois de la Chaise Noirmoutier), which comes with an presale estimate of HK$18 million to HK$28 million ($2.3 million to $3.6 million) and René Magritte’s 1962 work La Clairvoyance (estimate: HK$15 million to $25 million, or approximately $1.93 million to $3.2 million).
